


Not More Than I Can Give

by footnoterphone



Category: How I Met Your Mother
Genre: F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Moving On, but this helped, how I'm coping with an ending I didn't like, which is apparently not that well
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-02
Updated: 2014-04-02
Packaged: 2018-01-17 21:48:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1403644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/footnoterphone/pseuds/footnoterphone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Then again, none of them really joke as much any more.  It's one of life's lesser known cruelties, for even as he's had so much, had the insane, unspeakable pleasure to be loved by Lily, Marshall, Barney, even Robin--his wife's absence still sometimes hangs over him like a cloud, hanging over everyone he's with.  They can talk about her now, with warmth and humor, it's been six years, you learn to cope with life in six years.  But it's still there, that barely restrained rawness in all of their voices.  Grief unites you, but that doesn't make it easier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not More Than I Can Give

**Author's Note:**

> I've never really done this before, but this is how I'm coping with how much I didn't like that ending. I may have played fast and loose with the dates--I tried to Google most of them, but sometimes my mental math didn't work out and I didn't stress too much about reconciling them. This is more cerebral, anyway, and I hope it helps anyone else who's upset come to terms with the ending as well. 
> 
> Please leave comments! I'm new to this and would LOVE all the feedback I can get :)

Big romantic gestures, on this side of fifty, Ted decides, involve a lot more stupid, meaningless worries than they did thirty years ago.  So yeah, they totally have sex, but not before Ted spends a solid twenty minutes in his study, his children basically having fled he minute he released them, wondering: is fifteen and thirteen too young to leave his kids home alone together?  When was the first time he and Heather threw a party when their parents left? Is it weird that they pretty much know he's leaving them to have sex?  And God, _God_ , this means he's going to have to have the sex talk, like a real sex talk with them, not the kind when they're ten and in fifth grade, and terrified and you can just give them a stern look and say no and they'll listen, at least for a while.  

 

His heart constricts, just for a moment, at that thought.  It was so unfair, the horribleness of Tracy's death, of a young death, a wasting death, of laying in the hospital bed loving her heart out because she knew, even at the beginning, even there was still a lot of hope, that there would never be enough time.  

 

There wasn't enough time, at the end.  _Tracy_ should be here, now, should be the one giving their kids the sex talk with him.  For a minute, Ted's fingers freeze at the flaps of the box he has, almost without conscious recognition, tracked without meaning to, pulled from a high, dusty shelf without intention.  Moving on is one thing, but acceptance is different than peace, and his hand, drier and more wrinkled than the last time he held it, grasps the blue french horn again.  

 

Maybe it doesn't matter if he's ready, right now.  Life never does wait for you to be ready. 

 

So yeah, they totally have sex.  Her hair is shorter now, drier, and it looses that strictly coiffed look the second he touches it, which is the second they kiss, which doesn't happen in the rain this time (which Ted can't bring himself to be pissed about, but.).  

 

He kisses her, and he's glad he does, it feels like a lot like solace and a little like coming home, kissing her, like this, again, after all of this time.  But it's different now, of course it is, they're different people.  Wiser, maybe, but certainly more careworn.  Loving and losing--loving like he had loved Tracy, most importantly--it had forced him to do something real, something he maybe hadn't done since he was 27.  It forced him to actually fall out of love with Robin.  And falling out of love is painful, heartbreaking, but it can also be liberating.  For him, it was the liberation that opened him to the love of his life.  

 

Nothing ever forced him to fall out of love with Tracy, and honestly, even as he kissed Robin, Ted worried that nothing ever would.  Would it ever not feel like betrayal, of both of them?  Of a wife who was beautiful, so joyful, so like him in some ways that it hurt, literally hurt him?  Of a wife who was so giving that even as she lay dying, she was the one who reached out to comfort him?  

 

And of Barney, now a single parent, still living in Yorkville, still rich beyond anyone's imagination.  In the second before he presses the buzzer, Ted's mind flashes to Barney, a lucid flash of daydream, sitting at the kitchen table in tailored jeans and sweater--because this was still Barney, after all--now working on his second book, breaking frequently to talk through a particularly difficult math problem with Ellie.  They've been divorced for about as long as Ted has been a parent, and he knows the way a different kind of love changes you, but he also knows first hand how strained things have been between Barney and Robin: they're polite enough to each other now, friendly, but they've lost the warmth and humor that marked their early friendship.  

 

Then again, none of them really joke as much any more.  It's one of life's lesser known cruelties, for even as he's had so much, had the insane, unspeakable pleasure to be loved by Lily, Marshall, Barney, even Robin--his wife's absence still sometimes hangs over him like a cloud, hanging over everyone he's with.  They can talk about her now, with warmth and humor, it's been six years, you learn to cope with life in six years.  But it's still there, that barely restrained rawness in all of their voices.  Grief unites you, but that doesn't make it easier.  

 

(Privately, Marshall--who is still the only one who has lost a parent, which is another way in which they're all just unspeakably lucky--tells him that the grief never really goes away, but it eventually becomes a part of you, something that you love.  The rawness fades, he says, but the love you feel?  That's forever.  There's always a new forever, bro.)  

 

So his heart breaks for Barney, who hasn't even made tentative stabs at romance since Ellie was born--it's so funny to think of them both like this, middle aged and celibate by choice, but it's even more strange to think of themselves as young men, suited up and resplendent, so achingly desperate to be loved, to have sex, to make every night legendary--but he and Barney both know first hand the way that Robin Scherbatsky can get under your skin.  He isn't sure how to talk to Barney about that.  

 

But, yeah, so, they totally have sex.  It isn't like it was the first time they had sex, when he made it rain, when he raced up to meet her at her door and they kissed, young and passionate and totally overcome as he dripped onto her, onto the floor, soaked to the bone with rainwater and lust and a passion for being alive that he had never known before.  It's actually great, but it's all kind of...different.  Slower, maybe; he tears up a little at several different points, and when she reaches for his belt he blurts out an awkward "I haven't had sex in six years."  

 

Well, that's what he means, anyway.  He's nervous, his tongue is fat and slow, and he gets his words all jumbled and stuck together, and he is literally breaking out in a cold sweat right now, clammy, and a betrayer, when she shudders out a nervous, catching breath of her own, and glides the back of one hand along the side of his face.  

 

It's an unmistakable tender gesture, but also an unmistakably adult one.  She's marked too, from years of fatigue, of facing judgment, of being alone, fighting to not be lonely.  This isn't the same thing, she's saying.  Let's start over.  It still feels a little like betrayal, and he thinks it will for some time, because he still loves Tracy, still will always love her.  He's afraid to close his eyes, that first time, and the second time, for months and months of false starts and anxiety-laden backtracking, because he's afraid he'll lose himself, lose control, think it's Tracy.  

 

He's afraid to remember, but he's also afraid to forget, so he doesn't close his eyes, he gets hard but gives these weak, unpracticed orgasms, like a terrified teenager.  Like someone who has forgotten how to lose himself, to stop worrying, to just feel good.  

 

\---

 

It's Penny who changes it, now sixteen and terrifying him every day: talking like her mother, acting like a teenager, his little girl, inhabiting a woman's body, and he wants to say more.  He wants to remind her that she is perfect, that she doesn't need to change for anyone else, that she doesn't need to be ashamed that _Percy Jackson_ and _Divergent_ still line her walls, even as her friends grow up, grow out of them, because all love is powerful, magical, meaningful, and if something gives your life more meaning, then you get to keep it for as long as you want to.  As long as you can.  He wants to tell her that she doesn't need to starve her body into submission, beat it into submission on the track, and he tries, but the words all come out stilted and unnatural, like he didn't believe they were true.  

 

But one day in the spring, Luke is on a baseball overnight, and he's sitting at the breakfast table eating cheerios with sliced bananas and reading the newspaper, and she sits next to him and asks "Dad, can I ask you a question?"  

 

She sounds terrified, but not tremulous, and he realizes again that she's not his at all, that she's in some ways so like her mother, and that every single second he has with her is precious, tear-stained wonder.  He opens his mouth to say "of course," but it all comes rushing out of her before he can say anything, _there's this guy_ , and he asked her to prom, and she really wants to go, she thinks it'll be fun, but she can tell he really wants to have sex, and she doesn't want to disappoint him, but she doesn't know, she doesn't know if she's ready.  

 

"Did I ever tell you about my first time?"  Ted isn't sure where this story is going.  Judging by the conversation, no where not humiliating.  

 

"Yes, oh, God, yes, no, dad, please don't tell me again, ahh!"  She clamps her hands over here ears, clamps her eyes shut and winces, as if his story might be a physical thing she could avoid.  

 

"Ok, well, _the point is_ \--no, I swear, Penny, it's not a story--it's that, well, my first time, I was so set on achieving something that I didn't even think about what the point was."  

 

"The point of sex?  Isn't it, um...?"  she trails off, looking up at him awkwardly, guiltily.  

 

"No, that--the _point_ , Penny, the point of being intimate with another person.  It's to connect with that person, about caring for them, and being cared for, and yeah, fun is an important part of it, but thinking of it as an achievement makes it something you have to get through, right?  Sex isn't about winning, it's about enjoying and connecting and giving."  

 

"So..."

 

But Ted just smiles and turns back to his newspaper.  After a slightly-too-long pause, he adds without looking up, "You don't have to spend your life waiting for perfection, Penny.  You just need to make yourself happy, and try to hurt people only if you have to."  

 

\--

 

"I'd like it to come from me, if you don't mind."  

 

"Really?"  Ted shoots back, equal parts shocked and relieved.  Robin is business-like, almost harsh, and he's not sure if he's overstepped.  If he's overthinking over all these times, or if he's just forgotten how.  

 

"Look, to be honest, we were always probably too old for the Bro Code, or the...whatever, if you feel strongly that it needs to be you for some bros before hoes reason..."  

 

"No, that's not, I...Robin..."  

 

He's feeling off about this, unsettled.  Maybe it's just that he was never supposed to do this again, maybe it's because defining the relationship has gone well for him exactly once, and that ended in two children, ten years, marriage, and pointless waste.  He's been feeling off since he texted her after dropping Penny off at school: "I'm not asking for commitment, I'm not asking for anything else, but I think we need to figure out what we're going to say to everyone, and then say it."  

 

Robin had met him for lunch and had omitted the greeting entirely, opening with "Look, it's not like the gang hasn't survived breakups, or watching a friend date an ex."  It was more than irony, Ted thought bitterly.  It was hypocrisy.  After her marriage--and then really after her divorce--she had bailed, hardcore.  She had left them.  And it wasn't like Ted was super available to call her on it, he had kids, and a job and...a wife.  

 

But the benefits of age, Ted supposes--he's better at this, better at ambiguity, better at just saying what he wants or thinks.  "Honestly, Robin.  Look, yes, I agree, it should come from you.  But when I say I don't want this to come between the gang, I don't mean maintaining whatever sad pretense of a group life that allows us to have a pretty public relationship and not tell anyone."  

 

She quirks a little quizzical look, but she doesn't deny his implication.  

 

"I want us all to be a family, again."  

 

Her face falters a little, for just a second, but she reaches out and grabs his hand, running her thumb along its back, suddenly all earnestness.  

 

"I want that too."  

 

\---

 

So, predictably, they had sex again, that afternoon, right after lunch, and it felt kind of good--clandestine, like they were teenagers, like they were the first versions of themselves that did this, naive, stupid, beautiful twentysomethings.  And like themselves, well into middle age, slower, with aching backs and creaking knees and dry, weathered skin.  No longer invincible, with perfect bodies, energy tempered with an appreciation for slowness.  As he reaches to unclasp her bra, Ted has this aching feeling of déjá vu, and remembers, insanely, standing next to Barney as he married this girl, who was even then older and sadder than the girl he met.  Feeling, then, like his heart was breaking from pain and exploding from happiness, at the same time, so honored to be part of this moment.  

 

And it was as true then as it is now: the things that lead them to this moment had not been perfect--death, heartbreak, loneliness.  Falling out of love with your first love, only to let them back in, slowly, creepingly, as loss makes you something new.  But what is perfect?  They knew that this time around; they couldn't promise to be perfect.  The didn't promise more than they could give.  At this moment, all they promised to each other was that they would love each other--care for each other, protect each other--with everything they had.  

 

Because love's the best thing we do.  


End file.
